Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday October 15, 2009 @04:41AM
from the smells-like-health dept.

TechReviewAl writes "Researchers in Germany have developed a surgical tool that uses chemical analysis to identify cancerous tissue as a surgeon cuts. The instrument uses a modified mass spectrometer — a device that uses ionized molecules to perform very accurate chemical analysis — to pinpoint tumors so that surgeons can make sure they remove everything. Mass spectrometry has been used to study biopsied biological samples before, but never used in-situ. The key was to harness ionized gas already produced by the electro-scalpel."

My sister finished chemo and radiation about a year ago. In her case, she needed two surgeries to remove the tumors, and the chemo/radiation was to make sure they got anything that was too small to be seen with PET scans.

Uuum, please don't feet attacked, but... wouldn't it be the best thing to prevent getting it in the first place?

I know that in medical circles, prevention is mostly a taboo, and you can't prevent anything anyway (according to them). I don't think I need to tell you to ignore them on that. It's your life after all!:)

I am, for example, horrified by an ex-friend of mine who saw her mother lose a lung because of the smoking. And what was the first thing she did? Smoke even more! I mean, I know that cigarette a

It pretty pathetic. At the hospitals here there are always people hanging around outside the front entrance dressed in in gowns and towing IV drip devices. They stagger outside for a puff.

My wife's dad died of Nasopharyngeal carcinoma [medicinenet.com] and if you google around the risk factors are to be asian and to like eating fish. He belonged to both of those groups and was 75 years old, so the cancer wasn't entirely a surprise.

He was noted in the family for insisting on sea food, and that may have been a factor in his ot

It is fed into a Gas Chromatograph which gives the surgeon feedback about the sort of tissue he is cutting through. Seven years ago I watched an obstetrician operate on my wife with a cutting tool like this. She prefers that I not describe the experience in graphic detail in her presence.

The way I read it, it tells you what tissue you're cutting *when you're cutting it*, not beforehand. It doesn't "sniff out" cancer as much as that it tells you wether or not the thing you're currently damaging is cancer or not.

Assuming the device can be turned down to a very short 'probe' pulse, that damage could be minimalized and not much worse than would normally be encountered with any moderately invasive procedure. Losing on the order of 10s of cells for accurate diagnosis of the immediate area of thousands of cells is a good step.

Personally, I'd rather the surgeon have the ability to detect and remove all of a cancer from my body with only a little bit of extra scar tissue in the surrounding areas, rather than miss some o

Trouble is that it doesn't "sniff out" the cancer, so while yes, it prevents removal of excessive amounts of good tissue, contrarily to what the headline implies it doesn't guide the surgeon to the bad tissue - he still needs to visually identify it, or alternately prod every bit in sight.

It *might* be possible to combine this with an ablative short-pulse laser, so you hit the area with a quick laser pulse, which will remove something less than one cell-depth of tissue, and then analyze the resultant burst of materials. Problem with that is lasers are sufficiently destructive it might be hard to find much useful stuff in the debris, compared to the non-micro-destructive materials released via electro-cautery. But mass spec is pretty amazing in its sensitivity. Since nobody else has yet ta

I'm not sure what exactly they use as a marker in this case, but I know that one distinguishing feature for cancer cells is increased oxidative stress that attacks membrane lipids. Due to this, cancer cells have much larger concentrations of small-chain alkanes than you would expect in a healthy cell. Using alkanes as your biomarker has the further advantage of their structural simplicity; you can just dial in on the mass of something like pentane or hexane molecular ions without having to do detective work on a bunch of fragments.

Since the shorter alkanes are highly volatile, there have already been experiments to show that lung cancers can be detected by GC-MS of collected breath, and even some experiments that dogs have a sense of smell acute enough to pick up on these markers.

Cool, although it has to be said that tumours (from the Latin, for 'swelling') can often be felt by the surgeon and often it is not difficult to delineate the margins required for a tumour. This would be most useful in cases of nonpalpable lesions (like a very tiny breast cancer or pre-cancer). The linked article does not reference any original publications, so it is difficult to know what they used as a control, what compounds they tested for (as the above posters have mentioned), if they were just compari